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Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 memory works at a frequency of 993 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5830 is 101% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 64448 (101%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is quite a bit (more or less 79%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19800 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (more or less 28%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (28%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

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Radeon HD 4850 2GB

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Radeon HD 5830

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Specifications

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Model	Radeon HD 4850 2GB	Radeon HD 5830
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	Jun 25, 2008	February 25, 2010
Code Name	RV770 PRO	Cypress LE
Memory	2048 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	625 MHz	800 MHz
Memory Speed	1986 MHz	4000 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	110 watts	175 watts
Bandwidth	63552 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	25000 Mtexels/sec	44800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10000 Mpixels/sec	12800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	800(160x5)	1120(224x5)
Texture Mapping Units	40	56
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR4	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Transistors	956 million	2154 million
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.

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